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This case, What’s the deal with LivingSocial? from hBS case study, is a vehicle to revise basic techniques of advertising and consumer management in nowadays technological context, daily basis online deals.

LivingSocial is a website providing coupons and sales for local people who look for deals. According to the business, LivingSocial is able to provide their customers local and national deals and has now over 70 million members worldwide.

However, even that LivingSocial’s customer base expanded and grown in size, it lacks young population, most of their customer are 35 and above. Moreover, they have increased competition in the local area and facing their strong and main competitor, Groupon, which has a strong bond with the younger generation.

What I suggest LivingSocial can do is to partner with other company and form a strategic alliance. One opportunity is that they can combine with Groupon to get the most share in the market and combine their demographic. This allows expansion in both local and worldwide business, at the same time increase the number of deals and quality of deals for both companies. The other opportunity is that LivingSocial can expand their business to the west since they are basically in the east and missed out the opportunity in the west. This expansion will create more opportunities and a new market for them, and thus, more revenue. But they have to keep in mind that “Youth is fleeting so is your paycheck “. Any marketing they made, they have to kind of targeting the younger generation.

After finishing a presentation on The Weather Company: Creating Consumer Apps that Leverage Big from HBS case study, I want to briefly talk through the case.

The Company

TWC represented the most well-known name in the weather business. The Weather Channel’s 2013 audience totaled more than 100 million viewers and the network generated $350 million in annual income. It’s popular weather website, weather.com, boasted 8 million daily visitors and was the go-to website in 2013 for obtaining weather information. In fact, the website commanded an impressive 51 percent of the market share, followed by AccuWeather with just 14 percent

TWC has three divisions: TV, digital & professional services: “Digital and specialized business information products are two of the biggest drivers of growth for TWC.

It’s weather data came not only from the National Weather Service but also from data TWC gathered on its own and from data supplied by 100,000 private individuals with their own weather stations.

Business Model

TWC employed an advertising-based revenue model. Consumer ads were displayed alongside TWC’s weather data, regardless of where the data was served up— on TV, its website, or its mobile app.

A second revenue stream for TWC was the weather data and the expert analysis it marketed to corporate clients: TWC provides Professional Services to help its corporate clients profit from its weather forecasts by enabling them to anticipate the impact of weather on their bottom line.

Consumer Apps Ideation Process

They kept “Establish more binding relationships with existing ones and increase ad revenue” in mind, and reacted to the mobile mind shift. The company held Hackathon and got the idea of cyclist app that later on pivoted to a running app.

My take away

B2B is a very sustainable business for TWC since TWC is more of a company that has an absolute advantage in weather data field. However, it is still a new market and not yet saturated for them to have their B2C business. No matter what they do, either collaborating with other Apps or doing their own or stick with their B2B business, TWC has to research their customer cause customers for their B2B and probably the same for B2C because they need to know the customers of B2B company they work with. Furthermore, since this generation is a digital generation, entering Apps market or social media market would be a good idea for TWC to survive in future and grow in future.

In 2011, Marie Gulin and her team began to notice that ‘Splat’ was trending, with bright splashes of color on the hairs. While hair coloring was L’Oreal’s mainstay, the outlook for expansion in the home-coloring market at the beginning of 2012 was not promising. L’Oreal was in trouble identifying its competitiveness in its new products to compete in the market.

Marie thought social media would be a game-changer if the new trend can be identified. The company expanded its hubs in America, Japan, China, India, and Brazil, plus 22 research centers and 17 evaluation centers. “L’Oreal Paris was keen to break out of the traditional industry and to revitalize its hair color line” (from the case).

After all, the L’Oreal team needed to create engagement around brand leveraging on social media.

My suggestion to move L’Oreal forward in social media:

We should adapt push and pull strategy. Using social media to help L’Oreal push new products and pull insights from social media data about consumers’ preferences.

Using that, we create awareness, inform and excite customers about the new product online. By launching tag campaignw on Instagram, FaceBook, and Snapchat, L’Oreal can gain loyal advocates and reach people around the world.

This time I decide not write a review about The Nokia N8 ‘Push Snowboarding’ Campaign from Havard Bussiness School. I just want to express my feelings towards Nokia as a brand I used to crave for.

I don’t know if you guys remember, for about almost 13 years back, when Nokia launched 3100.

The exact white color that shows above.

It was my first phone and I remember it costs me 999 RMB ( $145) at that time. In order to buy the phone, I saved every penny from my pocket money. Nokia 3100 left a deep impression not only because it was my first phone, but also because I experienced the whole teenage year with it.

I was caught in class using phones a thousand time. I can’t even remember how many times I have to ask my mom to get my phone back from our teacher.

I ate fast noodle every day to save money for texting and making phone calls.

I was texting the whole night in my bed and had to be careful not to let my parents know. I have to hide my phone from them.

Even this game got me addicted for years.

Nokia did nothing wrong but went wrong at the end for not willing or did not catch up the change. Every time I saw my old Nokia 3100, I am in tears. For me, it is a memory. But even though it really means something to me, I wouldn’t be brave enough to reuse it. That is also what happened to many of my friends. Nokia became part of our childhood like Nintendo did. But it’s not like Nintendo that launched Nintendo Switch this year and tried to use its social media base and turn that into a new product. I still have hope for Nokia to come back, but not in phone industry anymore.

If you are anyone like me who has feelings towards Nokia, please feel free to leave any comments!

According to the case study Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld from Harvard Business School, the four giants hold their own competitive advantage and shaped internet as a marketing platform and capitalized at nearly $1 trillion for internet marketing. Amazon leads on internet retailing and Facebook dominants on social engagements, while Google guides on online advertising and Apple sets standards on device interface. In order to keep on growing, the four giants need to be diverse and compete for the market share.

Google – plays a role in all four sectors: online advertising, retailing of digital content, digital television and payment system and banking. It launched in 1998 and began to sell text advertising since 2000. It introduced Adsense in 2003 and set out to scan and index in 2004. After that, it acquired YouTube and double click. 97% of its revenue came from advertising. Being in all four sectors is a good step to make the company bigger, and its focus and not miss the opportunity and advantage to be the first few companies in that sector market. Moreover, Google is very smart too and should keep maintaining its lead position in search engine sector by innovation and technology.

Amazon – radical departure from conventional online-retailing practice makes Amazon more and more profitable. Its collaborative filtering tool is Amazon’s most competitive advantage that made it more successful than ever. It only has entered two sectors, retailing of digital content and digital television and is competing with the other two, Goole and Apple.

Facebook – launched on 2005 and became popular in 2009. Most of its revenue also came from advertising and reached $15 billion revenue in 2012. From here, we can tell that marketing firms court the favors of social commerce platforms because social platform reaches most people online and easy to figure out the target customers using big data analysis. It still will be the trend in future to advertise on social media.

Apple – founded in 1976 and had a bomb in growth in 2009. As smartphone applications played an important role in people’s lives, Apple entered and occupied large market share in the smartphone and combined contend to assimilate into people’s lives and make it undivorceable.

From my point of view, people buy stuff because of the content. To compete on the Internet, online content providers should come up with unique technology and ideas to attract traffic in order to sell the hardware and advertisement places. This battle among the four giants is a battle for the best content provider. Even for me, for this blog and for my cosmetics website, content is the key access to drive traffic, influence, and revenue.

This blog is all about SHARING my opinion towards different things in my life.

Partially, I will use this blog for my thoughts towards business cases for a course, Digital Marketing, I am taking at NYU.

If you like to ENJOY life, APPRECIATE different things, MANAGE yourself inside out and SPEAK up, HERE I have something for you, or maybe for us. I want this blog to become a community for all the people who I love and who love me.

For this first post, I am going to tell one fun fact about me!

Guess what? I have a very international background! I was born in Italy and raised there till 8 years old, and then sent back to China, where my parent came from. I came to the U.S. when I was 18 and had one term exchange in England. Pretty cool right?